1. Technical Field
The invention relates generally to telecommunications, and more particularly, to telecommunications methods that increase reliability of early termination of transmission.
2. Related Art
Telecommunications channels are frequently noisy and unreliable. As a result, if a first telecommunications device transmits M bits of data to a second telecommunications device without using any protection, the second telecommunications device may fail to recover some of the M bits correctly.
To deal with this and other problems, the two telecommunications devices may use some methods to protect the data. For example, the first telecommunications device may encode the M bits of data into N bits of data that permits error correction, where M and N are positive integers and N is greater than M. Then, the first telecommunications device may transmit the N bits of data, rather than only the M bits of data, to the second telecommunications device. Even if the second telecommunications device recovers some of the N bits incorrectly, it may still decode the M bits of data accurately through error correction.
The N bits of data may be contained in a data block and correspond to a specific transmission time interval (TTI). For example, for speech data, the TTI may be 20 ms long and contain 30 slots; each of the slots may contain 2,560 chips. One of the first and second telecommunications devices may be a base station (BS) or a Node B while the other may be a mobile station (MS) or a piece of user equipment (UE). The aforementioned transmission may be uplink or downlink transmission.
As long as the second telecommunications device has at least P bits of the N bits of data correctly, where P is a positive integer equal to or greater than M and equal to or less than N, the second telecommunications device should be able to successfully decode the M bits of data. In other words, it's possible for the second telecommunications device to not receive the whole data block but still recover the M bits of data correctly. Therefore, if the second telecommunications device determines that it can decode the data contained in a data block not yet fully received, the second telecommunications device may disregard a remaining part (i.e. a not yet received part) of the data block. This may help the second telecommunications device save some energy and time. In addition, the second telecommunications device may transmit a positive early termination indicator (ETI) to the first telecommunications device, advising the first telecommunications device to not transmit a remaining part (i.e. a not yet transmitted part, which may be smaller than the not yet received part because of time lag) of the data block. This may also help the first telecommunications device to save energy and reduce interference to other second telecommunications devices.